Yesterday it was the WaPo’s turn, today it’s Gawker.

(Gawker) — Provocateur, website founder and collector of America’s largest wads of spittle Andrew Breitbart died last Thursday morning, when some sentient shred of his cardiac organ kamikazed out of an exhausted sense of justice.

The invertebrate response from journalists was exactly to be expected. Breitbart said, like, bad stuff in his lifetime, but he also married someone and fathered people; once he even objected to anti-gay GOP rhetoric. A malicious career and two milquetoast mitigating facts: It all balanced out, really, at least for the purposes of forced, quailing objectivity. To borrow a gross analogy lustily employed on Breitbart’s own websites, if today’s mainstream media was penning obits on May 1, 1945, they would have summed up with, “Despite initiating the Second World War, the German leader was fond of public architecture and is survived by his beloved dachshunds.” […]

There’s a more generous interpretation, one echoed by a lot of comments made in hasty obituaries, that a wife has been widowed and four children left fatherless. And perhaps for some that’s enough reason to whitewash a career richly studded with racism, hatred, and contempt. Perhaps that’s enough to turn honest evaluations of a life riven with opportunistic malice into mealy-mouthed encomia about “a provocateur” and a “punk rock journalist.”

Of course, nobody was asking fretful hand-wringing questions about children when it was time to throw a sop to conservatives and pillory ACORN and Shirley Sherrod. Nobody asked how many children had been given a better life for having their parents rescued from predatory lending. Nobody asked how many children’s lives were improved by the good offices of Shirley Sherrod. In the last few days, nobody’s asked how many lives will not be affected for the better because we’ve lost their contributions. And for all the talk of his children, nobody’s asked what kind of America they stand to inherit from their father — whether black kids on the playground with them will endure a wider world of fear, wary of a country so easily whipped into a furor of suspicion of them, their motives, their peer groups, their voices.

HT: GWP